With Coremetrics Social, companies can measure the return on investment from their social marketing initiatives by using data from social media Web sites. John Squire, chief strategy officer at IBM Coremetrics, says these new solutions will help marketers develop “more targeting, highly-measurable, and effective social media marketing campaigns.”

“IBM’s approach to social media analytics is based on the understanding that people interact with an organization's brand in a number of ways, including email, social networking sites, and company Web sites, and the true measure of business impact demands a fully integrated view of the interaction with these resources,” Squire said in a statement.

Unica Pivotal Veracity Email Optimization Quite analyzes email links that are shared across social network platforms, tracking all links associated with a marketer’s brand and email. After several months of developing the solution, Michelle Eichner, vice president of product marketing at Unica, an IBM company, believes her team has created a one-of-a-kind product that reflects consumer interactions with brands through email and social media.

“Today, marketers are extending their email into social in a number of different ways,” Eichner says. “This is a whole new set of metrics where our industry has never had the ability to say 'Here are all of my links that were shared, here are the campaigns they are associated with, here is which campaigns are more popular in influencing people to share, and now I can know exactly who these people sharers are and take that data to try to get them to do more, to get them to keep on singing the praises of my brand'.”

According to Eichner, IBM has a “huge competitive advantage” in the marketplace. “There is literally no one else who has actually applied these two pieces together to this degree,” she claims. “We have the technology, and no one [else] has it. This is the first of its kind.”

IBM’s launch of Coremetrics Social and Unica Pivotal Veracity Email Optimization Suite come soon after IBM’s recent announcement about its Smarter Commerce initiative, which includes new cloud analytics software for companies to monitor their brands' presence in real time.